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Can We Use Social Media As Currency?

Companies
Embrace The Social Currency Movement

Social
media may seem conceptual enough, but using it as currency? Really? The
traditionalists amongst you will be shaking your heads but the big shots in
branding and marketing seem to think they’re onto something.

Kellog’s
launched the first ever Tweet shop back in 2012 to mark the launch of its new
Special K cracker crisps. Instead of customers handing over cash, they were
rewarded with the product in exchange for a tweet with the hash tag #TweetShop. Topshop quickly followed suit with a successful campaign for their Halloween fashion
collection, inviting fans to tweet their outfit into @Topshop with the hash tag
#TrickorTweet. The idea of exchanging social media coverage for products has won fans in locations around the world; for example, in Cape Town a vending machine was linked into Twitter filters
in order to dispense bottles of BOS iced tea when it received a tweet saying
#tweet4t.

Marc Jacobs
has become the latest high profile brand to harness the promotional buzz of a tweet shop, as
it opened the doors last weekend to its one-time pop up in Covent Garden. In
honour of fans’ loyalty to brand favourite the Daisy fragrance, the store
encouraged shoppers to exchange #mjdaisychain tweets, pictures, Vines and
Instagramsnaps in order to boost engagement with its social media audience. At ‘check out’, shoppers then showed staff their tweet, which was considered
according to its reach and innovativeness, in order to receive jewellery and
perfume products. A simpler post may have received a fragrance sample whilst
particularly creative posts were rewarded with more substantial items, such as a coveted Marc Jacobs handbag.

It was a case of Daisy treats for Daisy tweets, and throughout the weekend the latest live tweets and pictures were projected onto a wall of the pop-up store. Natalie Moon, UK marketing director
at Coty, which owns the license for Marc Jacobs fragrances, told Marketing Week
that the aim for the store was to reward the brand’s loyal social media
audience.

A similar
store popped-up in New York earlier in the year, attracting more than 10,000
shoppers. The pop-up stores will appear only once in each location around
Europe and the US (so as to maintain an aura of exclusivity and excitement),
but are a follow up to a more general campaign for Marc Jacobs to better engage
with social media marketing. The company recently launched an online campaign
to find real people from its Twitter and Instagram fan base to be the face of
its global Autumn 2014 range.

This all sounds terribly modern, but what
actually is social currency? Basically, it is the entirety of one’s
actual and potential resources that arise from one’s social media presence. It’s
about increasing a brand’s community and access to information and knowledge,
helping to form a stronger brand identity and providing the brand with status
and recognition. Instead of buying and selling with paper money (in itself
simply a signifier of value), a brand’s value will be signified according to
social media influence and it will exchange and trade off of this online presence. Social currency is based on the theory that businesses can derive value from social participation.

In the world of social media
marketing, which is essentially word of mouth advertising, a brand's social media presence suddenly becomes all the more valuable as they can use it as leverage to exchange and trade with customers and other businesses; word of mouth marketing is considered the
most effective form of marketing because friends and family are regarded as
more trustworthy than businesses and companies. If brands can harness the
potential of word of mouth they can change their brand perception in a matter
of hours and a few thousand clicks.

Advocates of this innovative modern marketing would encourage their critics to view experiments such as Marc Jacobs’ as exploring the potential for exchange and trade as opposed to simply decrying them as gimmicky give-aways.

But can we actually calculate the value of a customer’s tweet? Surely we can’t put an actual figure on it? Well, analytics company, SumAll, have tried to do just that. Analysing over 300,000 tweets they found that each tweet from a business generates on average about $25.62 in revenue.

With regard
to Marc Jacobs however, questions have been raised over whether this was the
right message for the company to be promoting. It seems quite off-brand for a
high-end luxury retailer to be flogging their most popular product for free on
the streets of London. Are people really getting on board with the idea of
social currency because they particularly need or want to engage with the
brand, or because a couple of inane tweets will get you some free stuff? It’s probably
the free stuff, isn’t it. Until social currency becomes a more stable and
robust structure, promotional stunts like the Marc Jacobs one will remain as
just that.

Recent graduate and now interning as content editor, when she's not writing articles Katie can quite likely be found festival-ing, holiday-ing or reading a book (dedicated English student that she is). Follow her @KatieAtSMF.

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I write about ideas. My background is in strategic marketing, PR, social media and project management, my future is in ideas. I’m professionally qualified with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, holding a postgraduate diploma in strategic marketing. After working for the BBC I spent a lot of time in the education sector. I’ve flirted with freelance work and consultancy but the BIG thing I’ve noticed is that people want practical results (ridiculously fast). I help boutique business owners and online entrepreneurs. One powerful idea can change your world, last a lifetime or even create a legacy. You can find me on Twitter @The_Ideas_Girl

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Victoria Greene is an e-commerce marketing expert and freelance writer who derives an unusual level of enjoyment from browsing supermarkets. You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce